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Jude the Obscure
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Thanks Chris - I have been told by other Americans over the years of bookclub reading that reading some of my posts is like going on holiday but that seems to be taking it bit far!:D. The distance from Old Sarum to Stonehenge is 11 miles.
Quite a lot of the statuary in our churches was damaged by Puritans during the Civil War but some of it is due to erosion, especially as the air has become more polluted. Whilst we were using coal as a fuel source most cathedrals in towns became very black and grimy but they have since been cleaned and that cleaning also caused some erosion.
PART FOURTH - SHASTON/SHAFTESBURY.In Chapter IV:1 Hardy describes Shaston as having 'a unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp, rising on the north, south, and west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture--South, Mid, and Nether Wessex'. Shaftesbury is, in fact, one of the oldest and highest towns in England, surrounded by rolling, green countryside and first mentioned in 880AD in the records of Alfred the Great. This photo of the steep, cobblestoned street Gold Hill, much photographed for the Hovis bread advertisements, shows the topography and its beauty:-
http://staging.dentonscreative.com/wo...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59y...
The town looks over the Blackmore Vale and Glastonbury Tor can be seen in the northwest. Glastonbury is an ancient Christian burial site associated with Avalon and King Arthur and with the story that Jesus visited Glastonbury with Joseph of Aramathea:-
http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk/
The religious significance of this area is, I think important in Jude and is perhaps part of the catharsis he underwent in Part III.
Chris the geologist may like to know that 'The Tor consists of layers of clay and blue lias strata (Jurassic sandstone) with a cap of hard midford sandstone, whose resistance to erosion compared to the lower layers is responsible for its height. The iron-rich waters of Chalice Well, a spring, have been flowing out as an artesian well for millions of years, impregnating the sandstone round it with iron oxides that have reinforced it. Iron-rich but oxygen-poor water in the aquifer carries dissolved Iron (II) "ferrous" iron, but as the water surfaces and its oxygen content rises, the oxidized Iron (III) "ferric" iron drops out as insoluble "rusty" oxides that bind to the surrounding stone, hardening it. As the surrounding soft sandstone has eroded away, Glastonbury Tor has slowly been revealed.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gla...
I thought maybe that the 'view from castle green' in Chapter IV:1 was from Wardour Castle, near Shaftesbury, which Sue and Jude visited in Part III but this 1841 account says: 'On the brow of the hill west of the town is a small mound or earthwork. The ground adjacent is called the Castle-green or Castle-hill, but there is no account of a castle having stood there.'The view is shown in this set of old photographs of Shaftesbury:-
http://www.dorsetrarebooks.co.uk/hist...
I was struck by this 1841 description of Shaftesbury as Jude would have seen it it:-
'The town is badly supplied with water. It is irregularly laid out ; the streets are not paved, and only partly lighted. The houses are irregularly built, and for the most part of mean appearance : the building, material commonly employed is stone from the neighbouring quarries.'
It seems a far cry from the beauty of the buildings of Melchester! I also worry about it being badly supplied with water as at that time poor water supply was a common cause of death from cholera and typhoid.
MadgeUK wrote: "...The town looks over the Blackmore Vale and Glastonbury Tor can be seen in the northwest. Glastonbury is an ancient Christian burial site associated with Avalon and King Arthur and with the story that Jesus visited Glastonbury with Joseph of Aramathea:"I particularly enjoyed the Java inset that played here against the picture of the Tor:
http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk/tor/ind...
Thanks for these links, Madge.
Lily reminded me to post this slideshow of illustrations to Jude but they contain SPOILERS:-http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ttha/Ill...
Here is a nice little Youtube series on Hardy's life but they contain SPOILERS. There is some good stuff on his marriage and footage of his funeral in 1928. Wonderful photos - play on full screen!:-http://www.5min.com/Video/Thomas-Hard...
Mod
I highly recommend sitting down and watching each of these short little videos. It'll be a fun 20 minutes or so, and will add ever so much to your reading of "Jude" and Hardy's other novels.
Well done, Madge, well done!
Re the discussion of architecture in Jude and Lily's post 38, this article about Gothic Revival Architecture and its theological and philosophical aspects may be of interest:- http://www.britainexpress.com/archite...
And GR's relationship to the later Arts and Craft movement:-
http://www.artscrafts.org.uk/roots/pu...
It was also allied to the revival of illuminated manuscripts:-
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hf...
You can 'turn the pages' of the Lindisfarne Gospels (and other sacred texts) in the British Library here:-
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacred...
'Ruskin's argument is that the Gothic is produced by master builders, dedicated in their tasks to a collective sharing of skill (often in directly venerating God, but not exclusively so), and working in semi-autonomous units throughout Europe.
Up until the end of his life, there remained in this favouring of the Gothic - this transmission of God's word through the tactile language of stone - a mistrust of the centralised authority of the papacy. Though Ruskin was raised as a Protestant by evangelising parents in the 19th century, he found the same sense of brotherhood in the work of masons of the late medieval period. To him, the Renaissance was a period in which mankind regressed morally.'
I found that first article relevant to thinking about what Hardy is doing with architecture in Jude.
Yes, the reference to Ruskin et al was pertinent. Do you see any sympathy in Jude/Hardy to Ruskin's premise of the 'transmission of God's word through the tactile language of stone'? I hadn't really thought about the medium of stonemasonry in this way but I got to thinking about Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona (which I have seen and which is still in progress) and how very tactile and religious that building is:-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_...
Better pics:-
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildin...
I thought about those passages near the beginning where Jude is building up his skills, almost to a greater extent than he might have and at least to a broader extent, because he was working where there was less specialization. Then, as his career went on, he kept getting crowded out for one reason or another. The work must have become quite unsatisfactory for a man of his on-time skills. Yet, the diversity also probably helped him continue to find something.What I feel as if probably exists, but I haven't "gotten it" yet is an intertwining of Jude's spiritual unraveling with what is going on with the architecture, both what he is now working and what is happening to the larger world. Was thinking tonight I might search the .edu sites to see if someone has published on the topic, but am too sleepy to tackle it right now and hope to be off to the Met simulcast tomorrow.
I think the story is intertwined with Hardy's own experiences as an apprentice and as a qualified architect. Quite a lot has been written about that both on and off line. I found this interesting little outline essay for instance:- http://college.holycross.edu/conferen...
Hardy never lost his love of architecture and I think it is significant that his last novel contains such a lot of references to it. He once remarked that 'if he had his life over again he would prefer to be a small architect in a country town, like Mr Hicks at Dorchester'.
I remember being enthralled by this novel which is based on the building of Salisbury Cathedral, which you too may like:-
http://www.amazon.com/Pillars-Earth-K...
When Jude arrives in Christminster he finds that the stones are aging and crumbling. Now, if your foundations are crumbling...your whole edifice is in trouble. This symbolises the disappearance of faith, of belief in religion. It could even be a biblical reference, for when Peter declares his faith in Jesus, Jesus replies "Upon this rock I will build my church." This refers to faith. So the deteriorating buildings are representative of belief disappearing.
The following is from a review by Susan Zlotnick, Vassar, of Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells, by Christine DeVine; pp. xi + 158. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005:"...DeVine's new realism depends upon a fundamentally altered view of human agency, one that questions the middle-class faith in self-making. She never acknowledges, however, that the tension between free will and social determinism animates the novel throughout the nineteenth century, although to be sure the turn-of-the-century novels she explores do seem to weigh in on the side of determinism. Nevertheless, there may already be a term for the trend DeVine observes in these late novels: naturalism."
"Finally, DeVine's insight that gissing, James, Hardy, and Wells portray the victorian class system as a social construction is valuable as far as it goes, but her book only lightly touches upon the more vital truth that by 1900 the victorian class system had become deeply rooted in the individual psyches of the English people. It is the internalization of class-class as habitus, in pierre Bourdieu's language, or class as a structure of feeling, in raymond Williams's-that emerges so powerfully in the novels DeVine explores. By the end of the century, class affect is exposed in these novels not as natural but as naturalized, and that is what gives the British class system its terrible saliency."
Victorian Studies. Bloomington: Spring 2008. Vol. 50, Iss. 3; pg. 491, 3 pgs
An excerpt from "Hardy Biographed," William H Pritchard. The Hudson Review. New York: Summer 2007. Vol. 60, Iss. 2; pg. 319, 7 pgs, Pritchard reviews Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin.'Those novels have been accurately and usefully written about in scores of books and essays, none of which have substantially improved on the sympathetic estimates provided by Irving Howe forty years ago. Perhaps the most radical re-estimating of them was given by John Bayley who somewhat demotes the last two important ones, Tess and Jude the Obscure, in comparison with earlier ones where Hardy more freely explored life.3 Tomalin speaks of how in those late books Hardy "coerced" his plots by - especially in Jude - "piling on the agony." She remarks, impressionistically but truly, that reading Jude is "like being hit in the face over and over again." Both she and Pite much admire the novel James did not, Far from the Madding Crowd, for its warmth and weight. For me it is the book where Hardy's famous rustics can be enjoyed without any annoyed sense of Here Come the Rustics Again, Talking in Their Funny Way. Pite has good things to say about Two on a Tower and what goes wrong with it; and both biographers pay attention to what, on balance, is my favorite of all his novels, The Woodlanders, about which Pite says, "Hardy had always been an acute observer of the natural world, its minutiae and its grandeur but he had never written about it so precisely, so movingly or, at times, so strangely as he did there." He thinks that perhaps its quality might have had something to do with the fact that Hardy completed it at the time when his friend and mentor, the Dorset poet William Barnes, was dying. (Hardy's poem about Barnes's funeral, "The Last Signal," is one of his most moving and least known.)
In one of Hardy's letters, he insists that his writing career, especially during the 1880s, was increasingly devoted to making his fiction more honest, despite the cowardices of publishers and some readers: "I have felt that the doll of English fiction must be demolished, if England is to have a school of fiction at all." The development of what he called "a more virile type of novel" culminated in Tess ("Oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile"), which became a bestseller and also marked the point at which relations with Emma began significantly to worsen. The worsening had something to do with Hardy's fascination with a series of younger women, none of whom made themselves available for a sexual liaison. (The most notable of them was Florence Henniker, who figures in such Hardy poems as "At an Inn" and "A Broken Appointment.") As Hardy became more outspoken in matters of sex and - in Jude - religious unbelief, Emma dug in her heels, grew more orthodox in her Christian principles and more censorious about Hardy's "freedom," both on and off the page. In 1899 she wrote a ludicrously solemn letter to a woman who had asked her for marital advice, instructing the woman that when a man reached age fifty (Hardy was about to turn sixty) "Eastern ideas of matrimony secretly pervade his thoughts and he wearies of the most perfect and suitable wife chosen in his earlier life." It is amusing to think of the Dorset stoic suddenly falling prey to the sensual corruptions of the East, but obviously Florence didn't find it so.
'Ralph Pite points out how vulnerable Hardy was to unfavorable criticism of his books and suggests that this vulnerability stemmed from wanting "mutually contradictory things; to be admired and, at the same time, to be unflattering about the people whose admiration he sought; to be accepted and to behave unacceptably." In this respect he may be contrasted with George Gissing, who remained true to his novels' dark vision of things - novels that in no way set out to entertain, as, for all their gloom, Hardy's always did. But it's a romantic simplification to say that - as I had always assumed - he was wounded by unfriendly responses to Tess and Jude, and thus decided to stop writing novels. In fact, at age fifty-six, with no financial worries and surely feeling the strain of extended novel composition, he could afford to "retire" and return to poetry, his early love. Of course nobody warned him that he would live for another thirty years of unabated lyric production.
'Tomalin's claim that it was only with the poems written in response to Emma's death that Hardy became a great poet tends now to be accepted, so it is worth noting how many fine poems preceded them.....'
Thanks Lily. I very much agree with the view that that 'by 1900 the victorian class system had become deeply rooted in the individual psyches of the English people.' There is still much 'Victorianism' in British life. I recently bought Pite's biography of Hardy 'The Guarded Life' and I already had Tomalin's biography. I have drawn on both of these for quite a lot of my comments here. However, I think Pite is wrong to suggest that because he was financially secure Hardy was not wounded by reviews of Tess and Jude because Hardy's own diaries, Notes and letters tell a different story - they express both anger depression about the novels' reception, as do the various Prefaces to Jude.
Hardy clearly put so much of himself into Jude, that he couldn't help but feel the negativity towards the book.
After Tess was slated he wrote in his diary: "Well, if this sort of thing continues, no more novel-writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at." He expressed his depression in Wessex Heights (1896) after the publication of Jude and in this poem he stands on the rise, looks down, and thinks: Down there they are dubious and askance; there is nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky
"How fares the Truth now?—Ill?
Do pens but slyly further her advance?
May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?
"Still rule those minds on earth
At whom sage Milton's wormwood words were hurled:
'Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth'?"
But it's a romantic simplification to say that - as I had always assumed - he was wounded by unfriendly responses to Tess and Jude, and thus decided to stop writing novels.If I understand the punctuation correctly, Madge, it is William Pritchard, not Ralph Pite, who said the above. I also don't think he is denying Hardy was wounded by the criticism, just that it is a "romantic [over] simplification."
Sorry Lily. Not sure I agree with Pritchard either:).
I know our discussion has now moved on to other books, but something that I didn't have time to write about earlier was marriage laws in England and Australia in the 19th century. When Arabella went off to Australia, I remembered from my family history research something about people being able to remarry if they hadn't seen their former spouse for seven years...and when I did a little research, I made a few notes. Unfortunately I'm not as organised as Madge (and doesn't she do a superb job with showing us all the villages and houses and everything else), so I don't have links, but I know that some of the information derives from To Have, But Not to Hold: A History of Attitudes to Marriage and Divorce in Australia 1858-1975
These are some of the notes I made re attitudes to marriage and divorce in England and Australia.The English laws and legal institutions governing marriage were designed by and for the privileged....for large numbers of the labouring classes in pre-industrial England,....law about possession and succession to property meant little to people who had none...
If a man was tired of his wife, he could simply disappear and move to another part of the country, and in this way achieve a 'de facto divorce'. Options for women were more limited. People could disappear, reappear somewhere else and remarry. The lack of central registration facilitated such arrangements. Sometimes one or both parties would remarry without waiting seven years, after which a missing party might legally be presumed dead. This situation changed when registration was brought in in 1837.
The seven year allowance dates from 1828 which allows for remarriage if one spouse were 'continually absent...for the space of seven years...and shall not have been known ... to be living within the time.'
Of course, if you moved to another country and neither party made the effort to write or make contact...
Horstmann writes... Divorce records in the late 1850's suggest that huge emigrations to the United States and Australia in the late 1840's contained huge numbers of fleeing husbands, as well as the occasional eloping wife...At the lower end of the economic ladder, many drew up papers themselves, legally ineffective but often believed to be official divorces. Bigamy was not uncommon.
An example:
David Bartlett,...from Wiltshire, described in 1831 as being married with one child, married Agnes Skewes at St George's Sorrell, on 31st January 1842; and seventeen years later, on 27th of January 1859, was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to one year's hard labour at Port Arthur. (Tasmania, Australia)
I noticed the name, because Arabella married a Cartlett, which sounds similar.
Certainly in Australian family history, it is quite common to find an ancestor who simply moved from one part of the country, and remarried in another. My own great grandfather being a case in point.
In Jude the Obscure, Hardy peels back the layers of the 'virtuous' Victorian society, to show the hypocrisy and unhappiness that can exist therein. He questions the laws and people's scornful attitudes. He is showing us the affect this can have on people's lives. It's not a pretty picture and was unpalatable to the society of its day, yet all he's really asking is should your whole life be made miserable by one poor choice in your youth, and shouldn't we perhaps have a little compassion for those who haven't managed to live up to the ideal?
Jan wrote: "In Jude the Obscure, Hardy peels back the layers of the 'virtuous' Victorian society, to show the hypocrisy and unhappiness that can exist therein. He questions the laws and people's scornful attitudes. He is showing us the affect this can have on people's lives. It's not a pretty picture and was unpalatable to the society of its day, yet all he's really asking is should your whole life be made miserable by one poor choice in your youth, and shouldn't we perhaps have a little compassion for those who haven't managed to live up to the ideal?"Well said, Jan. Thank you for the background information.
Thanks a lot Jan - most interesting and a great final comment. It was fairly easy to disappear to Australia even in the 1960s when my first husband emigrated there with his mistress. My solicitor tried to find them to institute a child maintenance order but was unable to do so because there was no legislation to pursue such a case then. He has not been heard of from that date to this although the law has now changed.
The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910
Books mentioned in this topic
To Have But Not to Hold: A History of Attitudes to Marriage and Divorce in Australia 1858-1975 (other topics)Under the Greenwood Tree (other topics)
Pride and Prejudice: an Annotated Edition (other topics)
Pride and Prejudice: an Annotated Edition (other topics)
Jude the Obscure (other topics)
The fictional town of Melchester is mentioned in Chapter 1 of Part 3 and this is based on the cathedral town of Salisbury, 50 miles south west of Oxford, which is also the s..."
Madge, these are simply amazing links! Fabulous photography, and wonderful information!
First, I simply had no idea at how huge Salisbury Cathedral is! What a beautiful structure it is. The detailed photographs of the statuary is worth perusing too. I wonder how some of the statues have become damaged? Maybe just normal 'wear and tear' and weathering? It seems that upkeep and maintenance of an edifice like this must be nearly a full-time job.
The "Old Sarum" link was fascinating too! It is incredible to imagine thousands of years of human activity on just that one spot too. Something quite poignant about the photograph of the old Iron Age fort, with its ruins, immediately adjacent to the little modern town just outside the outer ring of the fort. And then Stonehenge isn't all that far away, is it?
I really enjoyed the link to the "literary pubs" too. Very interesting to actually see photographs of these establishments described by Hardy, Dickens, et al. Alas, there just really isn't much of that kind of permanence in structures like this in the United States. I can't imagine very many bars or nightclubs in the U.S. still being used as such even 100 years later. I know that there are a few in some of the major cities along the eastern seaboard, but not like what you have in the UK or in parts of Europe.
Now, it is on to your tourism links! You bring new meaning to the term "armchair traveling", Madge! ;-)